The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions By William G. Bowen and Derek Curtis Bok (review)

Steiner, Daniel

doi:10.1353/pbm.1999.0044

Cited by 4 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…We are not aware of any studies that have used nationally representative data to investigate returns to college quality in an intersectional manner, considering race and gender simultaneously, as we do here. Bowen and Bok's (2000) influential book The Shape of the River is the previous study most similar to ours. They investigated employment and earnings returns to college quality for Black and White men and women, using data from the College and Beyond (C&B) database, covering three cohorts of students who, in 1951, 1976, and 1989, entered thirty-four prestigious public and private institutions.…”

Section: Race Gender and Labor Market Returns To College Qualitysupporting

confidence: 70%

“…Relative to White students who have comparable family backgrounds and academic records, Black and Hispanic college-goers attend colleges of higher quality (Bennett and Lutz 2009;Grodsky 2007). These patterns are consistent with practices of race-based affirmative action in college admissions (Alon 2015;Bowen and Bok 2000). They indicate that, all else equal, higher education institutions that practice selective admissions (i.e., are not open-access) appear to give preference to Black and Hispanic students over comparable White students in admissions.…”

Section: Race Gender and College Qualitymentioning

confidence: 54%

“…A number of studies have found positive effects of college quality on labor market outcomes, such as hiring and wages (Black, Daniel, and Smith 2005;Smith 2004, 2006;Bowen and Bok 2000;Brewer, Eide, and Ehrenberg 1996;Gaddis 2015;Hoekstra 2009;Long 2010;Loury and Garman 1995;Monks 2000;Witteveen and Attewell 2017;Zhang 2005). A subset of this research stream, based on nationally representative data, has pointed to null racial differences in the effects of college quality (Black et al 2005;Monks 2000;Witteveen and Attewell 2017).…”

Section: Race Gender and Labor Market Returns To College Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They investigated employment and earnings returns to college quality for Black and White men and women, using data from the College and Beyond (C&B) database, covering three cohorts of students who, in 1951, 1976, and 1989, entered thirty-four prestigious public and private institutions. Focusing on the 1976 cohort's economic standing in April 1995, Bowen and Bok (2000) found that the mean earnings of Black men who graduated from C&B colleges was $85,000, compared to $101,900 for White men. This gap was much smaller for women; Black women C&B graduates had mean earnings of $64,700, compared to $66,000 for White women.…”

Section: Race Gender and Labor Market Returns To College Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We also advance the literature on racial and gender variation in the returns to college quality toward greater representativeness in two further ways. First, previous work on labor market returns to college quality most similar to ours (Bowen and Bok 2000) has not included Hispanics, who have distinct labor market experiences relative to other minoritized groups in the United States (see Duncan, Hotz, and Trejo 2006). Second, we include years of $0 earnings or part-time work in our earnings analyses, breaking with this literature's common practice of using samples of full-time, full-year workers (Dale and Krueger 2011).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Race, Gender, Higher Education, and Socioeconomic Attainment: Evidence from Baby Boomers at Midlife

Conwell

Quadlin

2021

Social Forces

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This article investigates White, Black, and Hispanic men’s and women’s access and midlife labor market returns to college quality. To do so, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 Cohort (NLSY-79), merged with college quality information from the Barron’s Admissions Competitiveness Index. Although prior research has investigated similar dynamics in access and returns to higher education, this work typically excludes Hispanics and does not assess enrollments at community colleges and other less competitive colleges where Black and Hispanic enrollments tend to cluster. We find that Black–White and Hispanic–White differences in college quality, to Whites’ advantage, were fully explained or reversed once we accounted for differences in students’ backgrounds. At midlife, Hispanic and especially Black men had lower rates of labor force participation than White men who attended colleges of the same quality. Including such differences (i.e., years of no or part-time work) in assessing the earnings returns to college quality demonstrated striking disadvantages facing college-educated Black men relative to White men, which were not fully accounted for by background characteristics. Employment and earnings returns to college quality were not as disparate by race for women. Relative to White women, we find earnings advantages for Hispanic women among those who attended community colleges. This article demonstrates the utility of taking an intersectional and life course approach to the study of higher education and the economic returns to schooling.

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Section: Race Gender and Labor Market Returns To College Qualitysupporting

confidence: 70%

Section: Race Gender and College Qualitymentioning

confidence: 54%

Section: Race Gender and Labor Market Returns To College Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Race Gender and Labor Market Returns To College Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Race, Gender, Higher Education, and Socioeconomic Attainment: Evidence from Baby Boomers at Midlife

Conwell

Quadlin

2021

Social Forces

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Rankings without U.S. News: A revealed preference approach to evaluating law schools

Rothstein,

Yoon

2024

J Empirical Legal Studies

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Since their inception in 1989, the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings have influenced how schools, students, and the legal profession itself think about legal education. In the Fall of 2022, however, several of the most selective law schools formally withdrew from the annual rankings. In so doing, these schools laid bare longstanding criticisms of the rankings' questionable criteria and opaque methodology. While the long‐term effect of this boycott remains to be seen, school rankings are likely here to stay. In this Article we design a more informative approach to rankings, based on actual decisions students make. Using individual‐level data provided by the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), we analyze the universe of applicants to U.S. law schools for the period 1988 through 2017. In so doing, we are the first to create a revealed preference ranking based solely on where applicants matriculate given offers of admission. Our approach relies neither on potentially faulty data collection from schools nor arbitrary decisions about which factors to emphasize in rankings, thereby minimizing the scope for manipulation. It also allows us to quantify the magnitude of differences in preferences among schools and to test their statistical significance. Matriculants reveal a strong preference for a handful of the most selective schools; outside of the top tier, however, matriculants do not appear to draw meaningful distinctions between schools ranked adjacently or even near to each other. While existing school rankings sow more confusion than clarity, our analysis provides a rigorous and transparent alternative, and a blueprint for redesigning school rankings.

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College quality, students performance and labor market outcomes

Mattos,

Bacalhau,

Ponczek

2023

Brazilian Review of Econometrics

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This paper decomposes the effect of college’s quality signalling on former students’ early labor market outcomes. We propose a new measure of the signal for college quality: the performance of the previous cohort that has graduated three years before the individual in the same institution and major. Using a unique administrative educational data set matched with the employer-employee data for Brazilian formal firms we are able to identify that an increase of 1 percentage point in the signal variable is related to up to 0.42% larger probability of being employed in the formal sector and an increase of up to 0.4% in the early career wage. We also investigate heterogeneity returns by gender, individual’s prior working experience and field of education. We control for both individual and institutional performance levels.

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The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions By William G. Bowen and Derek Curtis Bok (review)

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Race, Gender, Higher Education, and Socioeconomic Attainment: Evidence from Baby Boomers at Midlife

Race, Gender, Higher Education, and Socioeconomic Attainment: Evidence from Baby Boomers at Midlife

Rankings without U.S. News: A revealed preference approach to evaluating law schools

College quality, students performance and labor market outcomes

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